I got my degree through E-mail

CORNELL UNIVERSITY gave Jonathan Quinn a scholarship in 1972 that covered a little over half his $3,000 tuition at the time. It wasn't enough to keep him in school. "I ran out of money and couldn't see racking up more loans when I was totally dissatisfied," says Quinn, an engineering major. He dropped out in his junior year.

Twenty-three years later, Quinn, now a 44-year-old sales manager for an electrical equipment company, is finally getting his degree. But it will be Cyber League, not Ivy League. Quinn is enrolled at the University of Phoenix's on-line B.S. program.

Loaded into his traveling laptop is all his course material. He boots up lectures and reading assignments after work, in airport lounges and hotel rooms. "I'll have my B.S. by July 1998," says Quinn. He's majoring in business administration. "The course- work is more meaningful than at Cornell," he adds.

Jonathan Quinn is a pioneer in what looks like the start of a big trend. Listen to management philosopher Peter Drucker: "Universities won't survive. The future is outside the traditional campus, outside the traditional classroom. Distance learning is coming on fast."

Fast indeed. Just four years ago Peterson's, the venerable college guide, tallied 93 "cyberschools." The 1997 Distance Learning guide includes 762. Robert Tucker, who heads an Arizona-based higher education research firm called InterEd, keeps tabs. He estimates that 55% of the U.S.' 2,215 four-year colleges and universities have courses available off-site. Over 1 million students are now plugged into the virtual college classroom, which compares with 13 million attending brick-and-mortar schools. That number of cyberstudents will more than tripleby the turn of the century.

A lot of people have long felt that education is too good to waste on the young, that college should be more than just a rite of passage for Americans. Besides offering the young an alternative means of getting an education, cybercollege is a highly effective means of providing continuing education in a fastchanging world. In 1972 just 28% of U.S. college and university students were over 25. By 1980 the proportion of older students had risen to 34%. In 1994, the last year for which statistics are available, the proportion of older students reached 41%.

The beauty of cyberlearning is that you can pursue it while working at a full-time job and living miles from a college. In an age when many jobs require continuing education, cyberlearning brings it to people who cannot afford to interrupt a career.

As the consumption of higher education has spread in the U.S., its economic efficiency has declined. The number of college and university students has grown 24% since 1980, but the money spent has grown three times faster. Adjusted for inflation, the average cost of educating a student for a year at an institution of higher learning has increased from $5,000 to $11,000.

In good part this has been because faculty productivity has been in steep decline. According to InterEd's Tucker, professors currently spend less than half the time in the classroom than they did 25 years ago. Many professors delegate teaching to graduate assistants. At a time when American business has been brutally restructuring and raising efficiency, colleges loftily resist change. "Despite the liberalism of their political cultures, these are deeply conservative places that resist change of every sort," says Bruno Manno, a fellow at the Hudson Institute.

Nevertheless, change is coming. Though the prestige brand universities are still besieged with applicants, smaller colleges are feeling the pinch as families and students are less willing to go heavily into debt to finance a college education. Over the last ten years, some 200 college campuses have closed for good-twice the number that shut down in the decade before.

"Market pressure is going to force educators to think about things unconventionally," says Peter McPherson, a former commercial banker who is now president of Michigan State University. "Every sector of business that has gone through this struggle has always said 'we can't do it.' That's what health care said, that's what the automobile companies said. But the markets do work, and change does come."

In a sense cyberprograms are heirs to the correspondence schools that date back to the turn of the century. Princeton they were not, but they offered a low-cost education to working people. This away-from-school schooling has been rendered far more effective by television, video-and the Internet, with its interactive capabilities. Modern technology brings education to the students rather than forcing students to subsidize fancy campuses and featherbedding faculties.

Not coincidentally, it makes it possible for all students-not just those at the fanciest colleges-to have access to the best lecturers and the best teachers. For a parallel, consider what the movies did for entertainment. Before movies a great entertainer could reach no more people at a time than could be crammed into a theater or concert hall. With movies the potential audience was increased by a factor of thousands and perhaps millions. It is conceivable that in the future we will have celebrity professors with incomes and audiences comparable to those of some entertainers.

On-line education makes it possible for students all over the world to study at prestigious U.S. schools without leaving their homes. At Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, almost half the students at its brand-new on-line Global Executive M.B.A. program live outside the U.S., "commuting" by E-mail from as far away as Switzerland and Hong Kong. These students are willing to pay a premium for the convenience of the remote access and the prestige of a Duke degree: $82,500 (frequently picked up by students' employers), compared with $50,000 for the regular on-campus M.B.A.

The University of Maine's Education Network reaches 9,000 students in 107 satellite classrooms, often in high schools, university centers or office suites. Sandra Woodcock, a 21-year-old waitress, lives on the island of Vinalhaven, off the coast of Maine. She is taking courses to earn her associate's degree at the island's brick high school.

Woodcock watches her professors on a television screen as they deliver their lectures. Questions are asked via a class phone. Homework assignments are mailed to her professors, and she takes tests at the high school, monitored by local proctors.

Tuition for the cybercourses is roughly similar to that charged at the University of Maine, but cyberstudents escape paying for room, board and transportation. The University of Maine charges $119 a credit hour; cyberlearners pay an extra $5 an hour. With 120 credits, a student can get a cyber bachelor's degree from the University of Maine for a tuition cost of $14,880-compare that with the $34,000 it costs to attend and live at the university's main campus at Orono.

Like Duke, the University of Phoenix charges its cyberstudents a premium over what it charges on-campus students. For cyberstudents, Phoenix charges $325 a credit for its B.S. program. With 102 course credits required for graduation, that is $33,150, about one-third the cost of going to Yale for four years. Phoenix students who attend the school's campus programs pay $25,000 for a B.S. degree, or about one year's worth at Harvard.

Are conventional educators happy? Hardly. "It goes against what Harvard stands for in terms of the learning process," huffs James Aisner, a spokesman for the Harvard Business School. "Being together, talking to people in the dorms or residence halls, is an essential part of the learning process here."

Perhaps true, but if the aim is to deliver a basic product at a reasonable price, a lot of students will willingly dispense with the beer drinking, dating and fellowship. If education is the goal, cyberstudents get that at a fraction of the cost of attending a traditional Ivy League college.

Economist Milton Friedman has long advocated stripped-down college educations. "There are many activities that have very little to do with higher education-namely, athletics and research," he says.

Friedman doesn't think higher education should be a monopoly of not-for-profit institutions. He argues that profitmaking businesses are inclined to be more responsive to the customers. "Institutions," he says, "are run by faculty, and the faculty is interested in its own welfare. The question is why competing institutions have not grown up which are private and for profit."

The University of Phoenix is a for-profit enterprise. It costs Phoenix on-line $237 to provide one credit hour of cybereducation, against $486 per hour for conventional education at Arizona State. The big difference: teaching salaries and benefits-$247 per credit hour for Arizona State against only $46 for Phoenix.

Arizona State professors get an average of $67,000 a year. The typical University of Phoenix on-line faculty member is part time and earns only $2,000 a course, teaching from a standardized curriculum.

Is Phoenix then an academic sweatshop where underpaid lumpen intellectuals slave for a pittance? No way. All of the University of Phoenix faculty have master's or doctoral degrees; some do research and publish books and papers.

Like their students, most of the profs hold down full-time jobs in the professions they teach, keeping them in touch with current issues and trends in their specialties. Accounting courses, for instance, are taught by practicing CPAs. Finance courses are taught by M.B.A.s. For them, teaching is a source of extra income or stimulation.

In fighting back, the academic establishment has adopted a Luddite approach: Stop change by smashing it. Among the establishment's most powerful weapons is accreditation: Without accreditation schools aren't eligible for federal aid. And, of course, conventional educators control the nation's accrediting bodies for higher education.

Most of these new cyberschools, though, have done an end-run around the problem because they are part of already existing, already accredited institutions. These schools, instead of fighting change, have decided to embrace it.

The University of Maine's faculty revolted three years ago when the people who ran its on-line programs wanted to grant a separate degree. The faculty won. Maine's cyberdegrees are now exactly the same as any degree granted by its seven campuses.

How effective are on-line programs? The University of Phoenix recently gave standardized achievement tests to a group of B.S. graduates. It gave the same test to a group of B.S. graduates from competing on-campus programs at three public Arizona universities.

On average, the on-line students scored 5% to 10% higher than their traditionally educated peers and maintained that margin upon completing their coursework. Discount this study as self-serving, but there can be no doubt that motivated cyberstudents can learn as well as motivated on-site students.

Economics or no, the "college experience" is highly esteemed in the U.S., and conventional teaching in conventional colleges is not going away. It is, however, about to get some sorely needed competition.

Especially so in adult and continuing education. Dr. Raye Bellinger, a cardiologist who manages a seven physician practice in Sacramento, Calif., has gone back to school without abandoning his business. He signed up for a University of Phoenix M.B.A. over the Internet, paying his fees by credit card.

Day one he logged on and downloaded the syllabus (textbooks available for purchase over the Internet). He also read his professor's lecture on technology management. A week later he handed in his first assignment-a 13-page paper on his practice's patient management system. "They insist that you write about things you are doing in your own job,"says Bellinger.

He then posted his paper to a class forum and over the next several days got responses from both classmates and his professor. Think of the system as a time-shifting classroom where students discuss topics as their schedules permit.

Take Janet Mize, a 47-year-old liver transplant coordinator taking on-line courses toward a B.S. in nursing from California State University, Dominguez Hills. "We carry on a conversation by computer and voicemail," she says. "I feel like we're old college classmates." Mize helped form a student nurses society-which has monthly meetings by telephone.

Just as it helps adults who need continuing education, so cybereducation helps students who want a college degree at lower cost. The world changes. Education will change with it.